There was a white lady of Spokane

Who presented as African woman

The hurt she pretended

As if she had mended

Herself, herself, herself, herself, herself……
Self-proclaimed and self-obsessed, so where did the open-faced girl go – the middle class white kid with room to choose?

Gone away when the ugly world closed her down, perhaps. Or when Rachel Dolezal chose to resign and re-assign herself, signing up to the victimhood newly associated with the confines of the ‘hood, and blacking up to ensure no backing out.

But look at her eyes, mouth, lower jaw – it’s there in the rest of her face as much as thefrizzed up hair and sunbed skin.

All her features – both white and ‘black’ – jointly comprise the face of that general fatalism which now underlies even the most voracious appetite for particular advancement.

Whether for personal gain or the ‘advancement of colored people’, underneath theshrills of advocacy lies a recurring note of resignation.

The fatalist frame of mind is now as widespread as its euphemism, ‘resilience’. General fatalism was the officer in charge of Barack Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney,the pastor gunned down in a Charleston church along with eight members of his congregation. It is the bass line underpinning the President’s second term as well as his rueful rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’.

Though they are not be identified as one and the same, the closure characterising this mindset is kith and kin to the dehumanising condition formerly known as oppression.

Sure, she was fakin’ the black thing. But Dolezal was truer than she knew to the stateof the nation; and closer to the rest of us than we choose to understand.